Into the Sunset

 

Copyright 1993 truth-or-consequences
2634 Words Exactly
Non-Fiction

 

There has to be some romance flowing in your veins if you're a horse owner. A completely analytical individual wouldn't put up with the critters. Mr. Spock, for instance, might be persuaded to study the silly equine, but he could never fall in love with one. Nor could he fully appreciate the country the wild horse hails from, or the history it represents.

As I sit at my writing desk, I look out over an endless panorama of open range land in Western Nevada. My view encompasses two thirds of the horizon. At night I can lie on my porch and stare into the starry sky, and I can almost forget that I'm anchored to this earth at all.

From my vantage point on a low hill, the desert sweeps away across a broad valley, ten miles or so before the mountains jut up into a cobalt sky. At the very tops of the peaks are clusters of pines. And wagon tracks are still prominent where loggers brought firewood and telegraph poles down from the high places.

I can see half a hundred mostly abandon gold mines there now; just little pock marks in the smooth, tan hillsides. Each barely distinguishable little flaw up there represents a dream-- a dream come true, realized in all its splendor, or, more likely, a shattered dream gone bad. Mule trails still switch back across the bald faces where sweaty gold miners packed out their precious dirt. I use those trails sometimes, and I silently thank the men who made them.

In the early morning the sunrise breaks over the eastern rim and the hills jerk to life under a blazing desert sun. The days are filled with intense heat and sometimes swirling dust and always the scent of sage and wild grass and horse sweat. The nights are warm and sweet and silent.

The California Trail of 1848 runs down one side of my property. I can almost hear the wagons creak late at night when I walk out by the corrals to talk with my broncos..

The Pony Express trail, still maintained, runs along the other side. We occasionally find long forgotten graves out on a lonely, nondescript stretch of BLM, and we wonder if some poor boy just had an unlucky run along that leg of the mail relay.

One of the old Butterfield Stage Line stops is right down the road. I wish the stage still rumbled through there. It happens to be for sale. Maybe I'll buy it and start up the line again.

Mustangs gallop and frolic on a gentle slope outside my window, half a mile away, as if performing on a stage exclusively for me. Sometimes they poke a curious nose right over my fence. Sometimes I hear them at night, clopping up and down my driveway. Fortunately, I like these things. In fact I'm in love with every aspect of this high desert country; the heat, the dust, the seeming emptiness; even the occasional hot midnight winds and the ever pesky mustangs..... One man's hell is another's heaven.

I watched a woman from New York come out here once to look at some property for sale. She said all this space hurt her eyes, and she got back in the car. She didn't belong out here. But some people do.

I hear from people all over the country who wonder what it's like to "ride the ranges". Then they ask, "Are there any open ranges left?"

Yes, there are. But not like the old days. When I was younger, in Eastern Nevada, cowboys still rode to town on dusty, flea-bitten ponies. No one thought anything of it. Nowadays if some weary cowpoke rides into town he'll bring the place to a virtual stop, what with the gaggles of wide-eyed tourists stopping their motor homes in the middle of the street to take pictures--

But in a few isolated corners of the West, you can still, I promise, ride off "into the sunset".....

Riding off into the sunset like John Wayne or Audi Murphy is romantic as heck-- but it's not without its dangers. But, come to think of it, maybe the risks and possible hardships are what lend to the notion such an air of excitement.

In the arid West you can still die of thirst, for instance.

You can still get snake-bit and expire out on the range, alone.

Your pony can mis-step in a prairie-dog hole and leave you afoot, to come staggering into town, dusty and hard-bitten, saddle over your shoulder. And when some suburban sightseer gapes and asks you haltingly what happened, you can put on your best steely stare and just say, coolly, "Injuns".

As a matter of fact I was put in just such a position some years back, near an Indian reservation in the Southwest. I'd been out three days, surveying a worthless mine claim. My horse, who never enjoyed camping anyway, hadn't slept well and the grass had been as bad and as scarce as the water. I was poking along toward home, hoping to find something suitable to drink in the lower elevations. My bronc was three quarters asleep, stumbling along the red clay trail, cranky and irritable, and wishing he was not a horse--

Five Zuni Indians jumped out from behind a pinion and ran headlong at my startled pony. The idea was clearly to rob me. I don't think they actually meant any real harm-- they only had sticks and rocks-- and robbing a silly white man who'd chanced into their territory was not considered "wrong" or "evil". It was merely their right, as they saw things-- and it was thought of as heap good fun, as well. They have a fine, dry sense of humor. I never begrudged them that.

But my tired quarter horse was too crabby to go along with the joke and he threw me and ran off. I knew he'd eventually go home-- he always did.

The Zunis got more satisfaction from seeing me dumped than from robbing me, and so they left me and my rifle in peace, and continued on their journey.

I was forced to foot it to the Interstate that led to town. What an incongruous sight I must have been, trudging in off the barren range like that; chaps, canteen and long gun in hand.

That was in 1986; so you see, the West is not completely dead and gone. Not yet.

In 1988 I saw a near gunfight on a boardwalk in a small western community while a herd of sheep browsed the town's general store. No, this wasn't a staged mini-drama that you pay three bucks to see in some tourist trap outside of Phoenix. This was a deputy trying to apprehend a criminal.

No shots were fired, luckily for me, for I was just downrange of the crook. The deputy unholstered his six-gun a split second before the bad-guy cleared leather. When I say my prayers at night I remember that deputy to the Almighty. The bad-guy was smart enough to know when to back down-- though not, apparently, smart enough to know not to be a bad guy.

There are a few towns left with boardwalks. And a few old deputies who still wear a six gun, instead of some modern, chrome plated, semi-automatic dude kind of thing. I hope there always are a few....

In 1989 I was shot at by cattle rustlers while on rustler patrol in the remote hills of a western state. I shot back.

In 1990 my boy and I almost lost our horses to heat and thirst, for the springs were all unexpectedly dry along a 105 mile ride. We might have lost our lives as well, but we stumbled into the Carson River just before daybreak, having ridden all night to get there. Our dog was unconscious. We'd tied her across the cantle like a bedroll when we became too sick with sunstroke to hold her in the saddle any longer. We never expected her to make it, but the cool river water saved her.

The West is not yet overflowing with Burger Kings and telephone booths, like some folks think. And thank God for that.

I know that many people have to ride down city streets only to end up in confined "wilderness" areas that are overcrowded with rude dirt bikers, gun-happy city "sportsmen" and drunken four-wheel-drive types. And that's sad. But many outfitters offer vacation packages to suit almost any need or budget. It's a way to see what's left of the vanishing West, even if you don't live in it.

At many ranches you can bring your own horse, if you have one. Or they'll be happy to assign one of theirs for the duration of your stay. The prices run the gamut, from ultra cheap, to ultra expensive. As always, you get what you pay for.

Or if an organized vacation is not your thing, you can simply wing it. Pull out a map, find a spot in the West that has few towns or roads, and mark your "X". A little research will be in order, just to make sure you're not planning a trip to the middle of the Nellis Nuclear Test Range or something-- But for the most part, you can simply choose an open spot on the map and go there. Most open lands in the West are government owned-- which means, generally, that you own them and can use them at your leisure.

There are areas where you might ride for a solid month and not see (or hear) a soul, if that's the kind of thing you're looking for.

You can choose flat, barren, white-hot deserts; or high, gray, craggy peaks; or lush, green highlands complete with babbling brooks and grassy meadows. On a horse, you can go where no one else can go, and you can cover far more territory than a man afoot. And you're not ruining the tranquillity of the place with some pollution belching infernal combustion engine or even some yuppy contrivance of steel and plastic like a bicycle.

You can ride among Indian ruins, if you want. I used to camp in a particular ancient cliff dwelling in Arizona that, as far as I knew, had never been found by anyone else. I swear I could hear the murmurs of ancient inhabitants as I lay there alone on the warm sandstone, in the silvery moonlight, drifting in and out of sleep.

You can poke through real ghost towns if you're so inclined. Most have been ransacked now-- but some still persist in good condition, in very remote and unknown locations. Half the fun is in finding them, and I'll leave that to you. It's hard to imagine anything more satisfying than to ride your bronc into the dirt street of a long forgotten ghost town and tie to the hitching rail. Every time I do that I half expect to see Black Bart stroll into the street from the broken doors of a dusty saloon.

The West is still vast, at least by modern day standards. I can ride, for instance, about three hundred miles right from my hitching rail, and never hit a fence. And once I find the gate in that distant fence, I can probably go another three hundred, and so on. Some may think that's a lot-- but I feel sad in remembering the days when I could ride three times that far. I suppose my kids will think a hundred miles is a long ways.

A Real Westerner still feels that fences ought to be illegal altogether. There ain't many "real" westerners left.

There's still adventure to be found in the West. Some of it's good, and some of it's bad. And for those who aren't sure, "The West" starts about Denver.

There are "characters" in the West too, and, like everywhere else, some are good, and some are pure evil. But heck-- without a little danger or hardship in our lives, how would we be able to recognize the nice times? Variety is the spice of life.

And there's mystery yet in the West. There are puzzles to be solved and unknowns to be found out, and things to be discovered. Just last year I found a silver pocket knife buried in a box with some coins, in the ruins of an old stone miner's hut, high in a desolate mountain saddle. An acquaintance found a rusty cap and ball six shooter in the garden box of a prominent, still operating hotel. All five balls were still in place. Likely it was stashed in a hurry after some botched mis-deed, and never retrieved. It'll never shoot again, but just holding it took my breath away--- and took me back a hundred years. There's more "stuff" to be found than you could haul home in a dump truck. Most of it has no value at all, except to you, as a personal link to the wild and woolly past that you yearn for.

There are a million warm nights left to lay under the stars and dream, while your pony munches contentedly a few feet away. And there are as many hot, breathless days to leave you gasping in the scorching salt flats, or thanking God for this one day of life as you bath in a secret summer waterfall, nestled deep in the piney forest, up on the high plateau.

It doesn't take a great deal of knowledge or planning to get along in the West, but it does take some. Mostly, it just takes horse sense and manners.

And if you really get stuck and just can't find "The West", lemme know. I'll give you some clues. Part of it is to be found in your heart, so maybe it's best to begin searching there. That's where I found it as a child.

I ride off into the sunset often. So far, I've always come home......eventually.

But maybe one of these days I'll see you out there...

...and together, we'll just keep ridin', into the sunset.

 

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